American literature, the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced
it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern
seaboard of the North American continent—colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured
westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a
nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to
the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place
among the powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it
became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East
Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling,
wrought many modifications in people’s lives. All these factors in the development of the United States
molded the literature of the country.

This article traces the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the
early 17th century through the turn of the 21st century. For a description of the oral and written literatures
of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, see Native American literature. Though the contributions of
African Americans to American literature are discussed in this article, see African American literature for
in-depth treatment. For information about literary traditions related to, and at times overlapping with,
American literature in English, see English literature and Canadian literature: Canadian literature in
English.

Periods of American Literature

WRITTEN BY: J.E. Luebering

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The history of American literature stretches across more than 400 years. It can be divided into five major
periods, each of which has unique characteristics, notable authors, and representative works.

 The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was
the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, often derivative of literature in Great Britain, and
focused on the future.

In its earliest days, during the 1600s, American literature consisted mostly of practical nonfiction
written by British settlers who populated the colonies that would become the United States.
John Smith wrote histories of Virginia based on his experiences as an English explorer and a president of
the Jamestown Colony. These histories, published in 1608 and 1624, are among the earliest works of
American literature.
Nathaniel Ward and John Winthrop wrote books on religion, a topic of central concern in colonial
America.
Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) may be the earliest collection of
poetry written in and about America, although it was published in England.
A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing
addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was
being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also
came from Great Britain.
The Federalist Papers (1787–88), by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, shaped the
political direction of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, which he wrote during the 1770s and ’80s, told a quintessentially
American life story.
 Phillis Wheatley, an African woman enslaved in Boston, wrote the first African American book, Poems on
Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Philip Freneau was another notable poet of the era.
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, was published in 1789.
Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative (1789), was among the earliest slave
narratives and a forceful argument for abolition.
By the first decades of the 19th century, a truly American literature began to emerge. Though still
derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through
the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an
unprecedented manner.
Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey
Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the
earliest American short stories.
James Fenimore Cooper wrote novels of adventure about the frontiersman Natty Bumppo. These novels,
called the Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41), depict his experiences in the American wilderness in both
realistic and highly romanticized ways.

 The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)

Romanticism is a way of thinking that values the individual over the group, the subjective over the
objective, and a person’s emotional experience over reason. It also values the wildness of nature over
human-made order. Romanticism as a worldview took hold in western Europe in the late 18th century,
and American writers embraced it in the early 19th century.
Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a
genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to
his mysterious death in 1849.
Poe invented the modern detective story with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).

The poem “The Raven” (1845) is a gloomy depiction of lost love. Its eeriness is intensified by its meter
and rhyme scheme.
The short stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) are
gripping tales of horror.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each
exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society.
James Russell Lowell was among those who used humor and dialect in verse and prose to depict
everyday life in the Northeast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes were the most prominent of the upper-
class Brahmins, who filtered their depiction of America through European models and sensibilities.
The Transcendentalists developed an elaborate philosophy that saw in all of creation a unified
whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote influential essays, while Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden (1854),
an account of his life alone by Walden Pond. Margaret Fuller was editor of The Dial, an important
Transcendentalist magazine.
Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels,
short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most-enduring
works of American literature.
As a young man, Nathaniel Hawthorne published short stories, most notable among them the allegorical
“Young Goodman Brown” (1835). In the 1840s he crossed paths with the Transcendentalists before he
started writing his two most significant novels—The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven
Gables (1851).
Herman Melville was one of Hawthorne’s friends and neighbors. Hawthorne was also a strong influence
on Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), which was the culmination of Melville’s early life of traveling and writing.
Walt Whitman wrote poetry that described his home, New York City. He refused the traditional constraints
of rhyme and meter in favor of free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855), and his frankness in subject matter
and tone repelled some critics. But the book, which went through many subsequent editions, became a
landmark in American poetry, and it epitomized the ethos of the Romantic period.
 During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and
about enslaved and free African Americans were written.
William Wells Brown published what is considered the first black American novel, Clotel, in 1853. He also
wrote the first African American play to be published, The Escape (1858).
In 1859 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet E. Wilson became the first black women to publish
fiction in the United States.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, first published serially 1851–52, is credited with raising
opposition in the North to slavery.
Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in
seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886; and she was a
woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a
Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and
emotionally intense. Five of her notable poems are
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

“Because I could not stop for Death –”

“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”

“A Bird, came down the Walk –”

“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”

 Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought
in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great
literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a
literature that presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. This was the
essence of realism. Naturalism was an intensified form of realism. After the grim realities of a devastating
war, they became writers’ primary mode of expression.
Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before
he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. He first used that name while reporting on politics in
the Nevada Territory. It then appeared on the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County,” published in 1865, which catapulted him to national fame. Twain’s story was a
humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain
deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. Some of his notable works
include
Major novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Travel narratives: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Short stories: “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn” (1880), “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899)

Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the
19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them,
particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities.
Theodore Dreiser was foremost among American writers who embraced naturalism. His Sister
Carrie(1900) is the most important American naturalist novel.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), by Stephen Crane,
and McTeague (1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris, are novels that vividly
depict the reality of urban life, war, and capitalism.
Paul Laurence Dunbar was an African American writer who wrote poetry in black dialect—
“Possum,” “When de Co’n Pone’s Hot”—that were popular with his white audience and gave them what
 they believed was reality for black Americans. Dunbar also wrote poems not in dialect—“We Wear the
Mask,” “Sympathy”—that exposed the reality of racism in America during Reconstruction and afterward.
Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality,
but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not
simply document truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States
and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-
century modernism. Some of his notable novels are
The American (1877)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)

 The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)

Advances in science and technology in Western countries rapidly intensified at the start of the 20th
century and brought about a sense of unprecedented progress. The devastation of World War I and the
Great Depression also caused widespread suffering in Europe and the United States. These contradictory
impulses can be found swirling within modernism, a movement in the arts defined first and foremost as a
radical break from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in
traditional structures and beliefs. Despite, or perhaps because of, these contradictory impulses, the
modernist period proved to be one of the richest and most productive in American literature.
A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may
be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward
civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at
the prospect of change.
F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby (1925).
Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son (1940).
Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937).
Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated
the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.
Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O
Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).
William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from
past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).
John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes
of Wrath (1939).
T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary,
multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the
dominant voice among American modernist poets.
Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest,
respectively—in which they lived.
The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston
Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.
Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for
poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.
During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of
revolution and experimentation in their poetry.
Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century.
Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely and
enduringly American.
Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into
Night (written 1939–41, performed 1956) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began
in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, performed
1946).
 During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice
in America.
Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our
Town, first produced in 1938.

 The Contemporary Period (1945 to present)

The United States, which emerged from World War II confident and economically strong, entered the
Cold War in the late 1940s. This conflict with the Soviet Union shaped global politics for more than four
decades, and the proxy wars and threat of nuclear annihilation that came to define it were just some of
the influences shaping American literature during the second half of the 20th century. The 1950s and ’60s
brought significant cultural shifts within the United States driven by the civil rights movement and the
women’s movement. Prior to the last decades of the 20th century, American literature was largely the
story of dead white men who had created Art and of living white men doing the same. By the turn of the
21st century, American literature had become a much more complex and inclusive story grounded on a
wide-ranging body of past writings produced in the United States by people of different backgrounds and
open to more Americans in the present day.

Literature written by African Americans during the contemporary period was shaped in many
ways by Richard Wright, whose autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945. He left the
United States for France after World War II, repulsed by the injustice and discrimination he faced
as a black man in America; other black writers working from the 1950s through the 1970s also
wrestled with the desires to escape an unjust society and to change it.
Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) tells the story of an unnamed black man adrift in, and ignored
by, America.
James Baldwin wrote essays, novels, and plays on race and sexuality throughout his life, but his first
novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), was his most accomplished and influential.
Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a play about the effects of racism in Chicago, was first
performed in 1959.
Gwendolyn Brooks became, in 1950, the first African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize.
The Black Arts movement was grounded in the tenets of black nationalism and sought to generate a
uniquely black consciousness. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, is
among its most-lasting literary expressions.
Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), launched a writing career that would put the lives of
black women at its center. She received a Nobel Prize in 1993.
In the 1960s Alice Walker began writing novels, poetry, and short stories that reflected her involvement in
the civil rights movement.
The American novel took on a dizzying number of forms after World War II. Realist, metafictional,
postmodern, absurdist, autobiographical, short, long, fragmentary, feminist, stream of
consciousness—these and dozens more labels can be applied to the vast output of American
novelists. Little holds them together beyond their chronological proximity and engagement with
contemporary American society. Among representative novels are
Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Executioner’s Song (1979)
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita (1955)
Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Eudora Welty: The Optimist’s Daughter (1972)
Philip Roth: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), American Pastoral (1997)
Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987)
Alice Walker: The Color Purple (1982)
Sandra Cisneros: The House on Mango Street (1983)
Jamaica Kincaid: Annie John (1984)
Maxine Hong Kingston: Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989)
David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest (1996)
Don DeLillo: Underworld (1997)
Ha Jin: Waiting (1999)
Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections (2001)
Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
Colson Whitehead: The Underground Railroad (2016)
The Beat movement was short-lived—starting and ending in the 1950s—but had a lasting
influence on American poetry during the contemporary period. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956)
pushed aside the formal, largely traditional poetic conventions that had come to dominate
American poetry. Raucous, profane, and deeply moving, Howl reset Americans’ expectations for
poetry during the second half of the 20th century and beyond. Among the important poets of this
period are
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
John Berryman
Donald Hall
Elizabeth Bishop
James Merrill
Nikki Giovanni
Robert Pinsky
Adrienne Rich
Rita Dove
Yusef Komunyakaa
W.S. Merwin
Tracy K. Smith
In the early decades of the contemporary period, American drama was dominated by three
men: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949)
questioned the American Dream through the destruction of its main character, while Williams’s A
Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) excavated his characters’ dreams
and frustrations. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) rendered what might have been a
benign domestic situation into something vicious and cruel. By the 1970s the face of American
drama had begun to change, and it continued to diversify into the 21st century.Notable dramatists
include
David Mamet
Amiri Baraka
Sam Shepard
August Wilson
Ntozake Shange
Wendy Wasserstein
Tony Kushner
David Henry Hwang
Richard Greenberg
Suzan-Lori Parks

English literature, the body of written works produced in the English language by inhabitants of
the British Isles (including Ireland) from the 7th century to the present day. The major literatures written in
English outside the British Isles are treated separately under American literature, Australian
literature, Canadian literature, and New Zealand literature.
English literature has sometimes been stigmatized as insular. It can be argued that no single
English novel attains the universality of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace or the French
writer Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Yet in the Middle Ages the Old English literature of the
subjugated Saxons was leavened by the Latin and Anglo-Norman writings, eminently foreign in origin, in
which the churchmen and the Norman conquerors expressed themselves. From this combination
emerged a flexible and subtle linguistic instrument exploited by Geoffrey Chaucer and brought to
supreme application by William Shakespeare. During the Renaissance the renewed interest in Classical
learning and values had an important effect on English literature, as on all the arts; and ideas of Augustan
literary propriety in the 18th century and reverence in the 19th century for a less specific, though still
selectively viewed, Classical antiquity continued to shape the literature. All three of these impulses
derived from a foreign source, namely the Mediterranean basin. The Decadents of the late 19th century
and the Modernists of the early 20th looked to continental European individuals and movements for
inspiration. Nor was attraction toward European intellectualism dead in the late 20th century, for by the
mid-1980s the approach known as structuralism, a phenomenon predominantly French and German in
origin, infused the very study of English literature itself in a host of published critical studies and university
departments. Additional influence was exercised by deconstructionist analysis, based largely on the work
of French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Further, Britain’s past imperial activities around the globe continued to inspire literature—in some
cases wistful, in other cases hostile. Finally, English literature has enjoyed a certain diffusion abroad, not
only in predominantly English-speaking countries but also in all those others where English is the first
choice of study as a second language.
English literature is therefore not so much insular as detached from the continental European tradition
across the Channel. It is strong in all the conventional categories of the bookseller’s list: in Shakespeare it
has a dramatist of world renown; in poetry, a genre notoriously resistant to adequate translation and
therefore difficult to compare with the poetry of other literatures, it is so peculiarly rich as to merit inclusion
in the front rank; English literature’s humour has been found as hard to convey to foreigners as poetry, if
not more so—a fact at any rate permitting bestowal of the label “idiosyncratic”; English literature’s
remarkable body of travel writings constitutes another counterthrust to the charge of insularity; in
autobiography, biography, and historical writing, English literature compares with the best of any culture;
and children’s literature, fantasy, essays, and journals, which tend to be considered minor genres, are all
fields of exceptional achievement as regards English literature. Even in philosophical writings, popularly
thought of as hard to combine with literary value, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David
Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell stand comparison for lucidity and grace with the best of the
French philosophers and the masters of Classical antiquity.
Some of English literature’s most distinguished practitioners in the 20th century—from Joseph Conrad at
its beginning to V.S. Naipaul and Tom Stoppard at its end—were born outside the British Isles. What is
more, none of the aforementioned had as much in common with his adoptive country as did, for
instance, Doris Lessing and Peter Porter (two other distinguished writer-immigrants to Britain), both
having been born into a British family and having been brought up on British Commonwealth soil.
On the other hand, during the same period in the 20th century, many notable practitioners of English
literature left the British Isles to live abroad: James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Christopher
Isherwood, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Anthony Burgess. In one case, that
of Samuel Beckett, this process was carried to the extent of writing works first in French and then
translating them into English.
Even English literature considered purely as a product of the British Isles is
extraordinarily heterogeneous, however. Literature actually written in those Celtic tongues once prevalent
in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—called the “Celtic Fringe”—is treated separately (see Celtic
literature). Yet Irish, Scots, and Welsh writers have contributed enormously to English literature even
when they have written in dialect, as the 18th-century poet Robert Burns and the 20th-century Scots
writer Alasdair Gray have done. In the latter half of the 20th century, interest began also to focus on
writings in English or English dialect by recent settlers in Britain, such as Afro-Caribbeans and people
from Africa proper, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia.
Even within England, culturally and historically the dominant partner in the union of
territories comprising Britain, literature has been as enriched by strongly provincial writers as by
metropolitan ones. Another contrast more fruitful than not for English letters has been that
between social milieus, however much observers of Britain in their own writings may have deplored the
survival of class distinctions. As far back as medieval times, a courtly tradition in literature cross-fertilized
with an earthier demotic one. Shakespeare’s frequent juxtaposition of royalty in one scene with plebeians
in the next reflects a very British way of looking at society. This awareness of differences between high
life and low, a state of affairs fertile in creative tensions, is observable throughout the history of English
literature.
The Old English Period
Poetry

The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who invaded Britain in the 5th and 6th centuries brought with them the
common Germanic metre; but of their earliest oral poetry, probably used for panegyric, magic, and short
narrative, little or none survives. For nearly a century after the conversion of King Aethelberht I of Kent
to Christianity about 600, there is no evidence that the English wrote poetry in their own language. But St.
Bede the Venerable, in his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum(“Ecclesiastical History of the English
People”), wrote that in the late 7th century Caedmon, an illiterate Northumbrian cowherd, was inspired in
a dream to compose a short hymn in praise of the creation. Caedmon later composed verses based on
Scripture, which was expounded for him by monks at Streaneshalch (now called Whitby), but only the
“Hymn of Creation” survives. Caedmon legitimized the native verse form by adapting it to Christian
themes. Others, following his example, gave England a body of vernacular poetry unparalleled
in Europe before the end of the 1st millennium.
Alliterative verse
Virtually all Old English poetry is written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or
caesura, between the second and third stresses, and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line;
this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of
stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying standard epithets to various classes of characters, and
depicting scenery with such recurring images as the eagle and the wolf, which wait during battles to feast
on carrion, and ice and snow, which appear in the landscape to signal sorrow. In the best poems such
formulas, far from being tedious, give a strong impression of the richness of the cultural fund from which
poets could draw. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning, a figurative name for a thing,
usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g., swan-road used to name the sea); and variation, the
repeating of a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new level of meaning. That
these verse techniques changed little during 400 years of literary production suggests the
extreme conservatism of Anglo-Saxon culture.
The major manuscripts

Most Old English poetry is preserved in four manuscripts of the late 10th and early 11th centuries.
The Beowulf manuscript (British Library) contains Beowulf, Judith, and three prose tracts; the Exeter
Book (Exeter Cathedral) is a miscellaneous gathering of lyrics, riddles, didactic poems, and religious
narratives; the Junius Manuscript (Bodleian Library, Oxford)—also called the Caedmon Manuscript, even
though its contents are no longer attributed to Caedmon—contains biblical paraphrases; and the Vercelli
Book (found in the cathedral library in Vercelli, Italy) contains saints’ lives, several short religious poems,
and prose homilies. In addition to the poems in these books are historical poems in the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle; poetic renderings of Psalms 51–150; the 31 “Metres” included in King Alfred the Great’s
translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae (Consolation of Philosophy); magical, didactic,
elegiac, and heroic poems; and others, miscellaneously interspersed with prose, jotted in margins, and
even worked in stone or metal.
Problems of dating

Few poems can be dated as closely as Caedmon’s “Hymn.” King Alfred’s compositions fall into the late
9th century, and Bede composed his “Death Song” within 50 days of his death on May 25, 735. Historical
poems such as “The Battle of Brunanburh” (after 937) and “The Battle of Maldon” (after 991) are fixed by
the dates of the events they commemorate. A translation of one of Aldhelm’s riddles is found not only in
the Exeter Book but also in an early 9th-century manuscript at Leiden, Neth. And at least a part of “The
Dream of the Rood” can be dated by an excerpt carved on the 8th-century Ruthwell Cross (in
Dumfriesshire, Scot.). But in the absence of such indications, Old English poems are hard to date, and
the scholarly consensus that most were composed in the Midlands and the North in the 8th and 9th
centuries gave way to uncertainty during the last two decades of the 20th century. Many now hold that
“The Wanderer,” Beowulf, and other poems once assumed to have been written in the 8th century are of
the 9th century or later. For most poems, there is no scholarly consensus beyond the belief that they were
written between the 8th and the 11th centuries.
Religious verse

If few poems can be dated accurately, still fewer can be attributed to particular poets. The most
important author from whom a considerable body of work survives is Cynewulf, who wove his runic
signature into the epilogues of four poems. Aside from his name, little is known of him; he probably
lived in the 9th century in Mercia or Northumbria. His works include The Fates of the Apostles, a short
martyrology; The Ascension(also called Christ II), a homily and biblical narrative; Juliana, a saint’s
passion set in the reign of the Roman emperor Maximian (late 3rd century AD); and Elene, perhaps the
best of his poems, which describes the mission of St. Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine, to
recover Christ’s cross. Cynewulf’s work is lucid and technically elegant; his theme is the continuing
evangelical mission from the time of Christ to the triumph of Christianity under Constantine. Several
poems not by Cynewulf are associated with him because of their subject matter. These include two lives
of St. Guthlac and Andreas; the latter, the apocryphalstory of how St. Andrew fell into the hands of the
cannibalistic (and presumably mythical) Mermedonians, has stylistic affinities with Beowulf. Also in the
“Cynewulf group” are several poems with Christ as their subject, of which the most important is “The
Dream of the Rood,” in which the cross speaks of itself as Christ’s loyal thane and yet the instrument of
his death. This tragic paradox echoes a recurring theme of secular poetry and at the same time movingly
expresses the religious paradoxes of Christ’s triumph in death and humankind’s redemption from sin.
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Several poems of the Junius Manuscript are based on the Old Testamentnarratives Genesis, Exodus,
and Daniel. Of these, Exodus is remarkable for its intricate diction and bold imagery. The
fragmentary Judith of the Beowulf Manuscript stirringly embellishes the story from the Apocrypha of the
heroine who led the Jews to victory over the Assyrians.
Elegiac and heroic verse

The term elegy is used of Old English poems that lament the loss of worldly goods, glory, or human
companionship. “The Wanderer” is narrated by a man, deprived of lord and kinsmen, whose journeys
lead him to the realization that there is stability only in heaven. “The Seafarer” is similar, but its journey
motif more explicitly symbolizes the speaker’s spiritual yearnings. Several others have similar themes,
and three elegies—“The Husband’s Message,” “The Wife’s Lament,” and “Wulf and Eadwacer”—describe
what appears to be a conventional situation: the separation of husband and wife by the husband’s exile.
“Deor” bridges the gap between the elegy and the heroic poem, for in it a poet laments the loss of his
position at court by alluding to sorrowful stories from Germanic legend. Beowulf itself narrates the battles
of Beowulf, a prince of the Geats (a tribe in what is now southern Sweden), against the
monstrous Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. The account contains some of the
best elegiac verse in the language, and, by setting marvelous tales against a historical background in
which victory is always temporary and strife is always renewed, the poet gives the whole an elegiac
cast. Beowulf also is one of the best religious poems, not only because of its explicitly Christian passages
but also because Beowulf’s monstrous foes are depicted as God’s enemies and Beowulf himself as God’s
champion. Other heroic narratives are fragmentary. Of “The Battle of Finnsburh” and “Waldere” only
enough remains to indicate that, when whole, they must have been fast-paced and stirring.
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Of several poems dealing with English history and preserved in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the most
notable is “The Battle of Brunanburh,” a panegyric on the occasion of King Athelstan’s victory over a
coalition of Norsemen and Scots in 937. But the best historical poem is not from the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle. “The Battle of Maldon,” which describes the defeat of Aldorman Byrhtnoth and much of his
army at the hands of Viking invaders in 991, discovers in defeat an occasion to celebrate the heroic ideal,
contrasting the determination of many of Byrhtnoth’s thanes to avenge his death or die in the attempt with
the cowardice of others who left the field. Minor poetic genres include catalogs (two sets of “Maxims” and
“Widsith,” a list of rulers, tribes, and notables in the heroic age), dialogues, metrical prefaces and
epilogues to prose works of the Alfredian period, and liturgical poems associated with the Benedictine
Office.